Currently adrift in bracketology
Researching each team in the tourney
Reviewing the season
And each quality win
Soothsaying who will hoist the trophy

© 2019 Jason A. Muckley

Today’s “Word of the Day” on Dictionary.com is “bracketology.”

bracketology
noun [brak-i-tol-uh-jee] Sports.
a system of diagrammatically predicting and tracking the process of elimination among sequentially paired opponents in a tournament, especially an NCAA basketball tournament.

What is the origin of bracketology?
Bracketology combines bracket, in the sports sense of “a diagram for tracking advancement in a tournament,” and -ology, a word-forming element indicating “branch of knowledge, science.” The term playfully elevates the sports pastime to a discipline or science. Stages of sports tournaments have been termed brackets since the early 1900s, from bracket as a “grouping” in the late 1800s, a sense informed by pairs of typographical brackets for enclosing text or numbers. The tree-diagram structure of NCAA basketball tournament brackets indeed calls up such typographical brackets, named after the original architectural bracket, a type of L-shaped support projecting from a wall.

(Definition and origin from Dictionary.com. The full entry can be found here.)